Egypt's 5G market finally takes shape as remaining permits are issued

The operators attended a rubber-stamping ceremony organised by the National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) and witnessed by Amr Talaat, Egypt's minister of communications and IT (MCIT).

They join incumbent Telecom Egypt, which received its 5G licence nine months earlier, for some reason.

The MCIT explained that the four operators agreed to stump up a combined $675 million for 15-year permits. In addition to 5G, the licences also extend by 15 years all licences to operate previous-generation mobile tech.

When Telecom Egypt acquired its licence back in January, it paid $150 million. That means the other three had to fork over $525 million between them. Beyond that, it's hard to calculate exactly how much each of E&, Orange and Vodafone has paid.

Part of the reason why is because Egypt's 5G licensing process was effectively a refarming process – it didn't involve the allocation of new frequencies and there wasn't an auction. It means that the fee paid by each telco to reuse some spectrum for 5G and renew previous licences was likely determined by the quantity of spectrum each operator already holds.

When it comes to the frequencies that E&, Orange, Telecom Egypt and Vodafone are likely to reuse specifically for 5G, the best guess is it will probably be their 2.6-GHz TDD spectrum. Currently in use in Egypt for 4G, 2.6-GHz is also a widely-used 5G new radio (NR) band.

It has been fairly evenly distributed between the four of them. In late 2020, e& and Telecom Egypt each acquired two 10-MHz blocks, while Vodafone picked up two 20-MHz blocks. Orange got in on the act in 2022 with the acquisition of 30 MHz.

Whether these operators roll out 5G on 2.6-GHz or some other band remains to be seen. What is clear – and a little bit concerning – is that there is a high degree of educated guesswork involved with trying to work all this out.

It is symptomatic of an opaque licensing process that leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

Egypt started making headway with 5G as far back as 2019, but by late 2023, in the months leading up to Telecom Egypt securing the country's first 5G licence, the NTRA was only just finalising the licensing process, aiming to wrap the whole thing up by the end of the year, possibly January. Local media was under the impression that licences would cost $500 million.

Then, with little fanfare, incumbent Telecom Egypt bagged the first licence for $150 million, and there then followed nine months of radio silence. Baffling.

Now the remaining permits have finally been issued, the NTRA seems to be feeling decidedly more chatty, albeit about the transformative potential of 5G, rather than how it went about the licensing process.

According to remarks attributed to NTRA chief exec Mohamed Shamroukh, "launching 5G services in Egypt represents an important step to enhance the capabilities of the communications market," and that "the authority has made great efforts in cooperation with partners to achieve this step, which will contribute to providing innovative solutions that meet the needs of various sectors and provide advanced user experiences."

With Egypt arriving more than a little late to the 5G party, it might be worth pointing out that so far 5G has struggled to live up to its billing, and that the NTRA probably needs to lower its expectations a little.